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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

nytimes.com

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Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#641

Post by nullindividual »

adolph wrote: post #118
nullindividual wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may use sin taxes or similar as an outward excuse, but I doubt rational individuals want to overthrow the government because they are paying an extra 25 cents for soda or haven't had their wetlands paved over for additional parking spaces.

Goalpost movement noted. Is being "driven by the cattle prod" a valid excuse to hold views described as "distrusts or dislikes the government?"

No goal posts were moved, but nice try. You also seem to be under the false assumption that the cattle prod is a real device in this scenario.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#642

Post by pkulak »

rayiner wrote: post #410
pkulak wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re luck…

Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system. Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are…

I can get everywhere I need to go in NYC with a few bucks loaded onto a transit card. In Atlanta I need to rent a car for $100s a day, drive it myself, pay for it's gas, its insurance and parking, prove to the local government that I'm certified to drive it, and also not impaired from driving it at the moment. How do you get "cheaper" from that?

"nicer" and "cleaner" mean the same thing, and I'll give those to you. When you create a transit system that poor people can't afford to use... you don't see poor people anymore. But they didn't disappear, and you didn't solve a problem.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#643

Post by dmix »

stouset wrote: post #447
dmix wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dont poor people in Paris live on the edges of the city far away from the good jobs downtown and are closer to the highways? I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america. The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cit…

I know it’s hard to imagine if America is all you know, but there are other alternatives than endless suburbia.

yes but local government regulation prevents it, zoning and other overt policies manufactured suburbia, not supply and demand, while NIBMYism kills any possible development in urban areas or suburbs on the edges of cities

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#644

Post by thsksbd »

datavirtue wrote: post #619
thsksbd wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for that lifestyle lecture. My kids hated the bjorn and so did my (very third world communist country) foreign wife. I liked it. The stroller also has storage space for, for example, the medicine bag that keeps my last kid alive in case he swallows . The stroller has everything ready to go except the baby and we don't have to don our various accessories. Finally, as Europeans, we find those Americans and th…

Ah dignity. The reason mass transit will never take hold in America.

? The reason no one wants to take the bus or subway in America is not because they are undignified but because they smell like piss. Unlike the buses in Switzerland which are great.

In fact, despite the smell of urine, I used to love Atlantas MARTA for its brilliant airport exit.

There's nothing inherently undignified of public transportation system. America's indignity comes from our inability to clean.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#645

Post by pkulak »

osigurdson wrote: post #417
pkulak wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re luck…

I don't think it is mathematically possible to build trains for everywhere people want to go. Fine for extremely dense areas, otherwise inconvenient and dumb.

The only reason we have cities with crap density is cars, and their super-wide roads and giant parking lots spreading everything out. So, yes, we can't just put a subway system under Dallas. That's why I said busses first. At the very least stop building more lane miles and making it worse.

Or do keep building more roads. I don't really care. If people love traffic and want to live in their car, there should be a city for them (so long as they are not sucking up federal dollars to do it). The problem is that right now, in NA, all we build are roads. Every city is a shitty carbon copy of the next one. No one is trying anything new.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#646

Post by kjkjadksj »

prmoustache wrote: post #548
kjkjadksj wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from these clips, the road doesn’t have to be congested for things to go sideways before reaction time kicks in. And even from my own experiences, I once hit a big board with my car on the freeway. Didn’t see it until there it was. Four flats and a bit of a scare vs the end of my life probably right then if I were on a bike in all likelihood.

You have probably hit that big board because you are driving an extension of your living room and are thus totally incentivised by dangers and not following legal and recommended security distance between you and the vehicle in front of you. Also dangers are easier to avoid on a bike provided you are going at reasonnable speed because your own vehicle is smaller. The biggest danger is target fixation but that is some…

You can’t imagine that someone driving safely wouldn’t hit a board? On a highway you are rarely afforded the luxury of having a full stopping distance anyway. I think the book says for every 10mph you go you should factor in 10 seconds. So 60mph would be a 6 second stopping distance, so I would need to see a car pass something and count to six before I pass that. If I had that sort of spacing on my commute, people would immediately merge into it. Thats just the reality. Then I am left with what three seconds to recognize a board emerging from the rear tires in front of me and somehow also check to see if its clear and also merge out of the way of this board. Its just not happening you are hitting the board almost as soon as you recognize its there.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#647

Post by tsimionescu »

osigurdson wrote: post #587
tsimionescu wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to good public transit for everyone is bad public transit for the majority and cars for a few. You don't get to imagine an alternative like "cars for everyone", because it's simply not possible.

That is literally what we have now.

No, in most cities most people by far use public transit for their commute. And in most cities, especially where this is not exactly true, car traffic is already hellish at rush hour.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#648

Post by kjkjadksj »

Maarten88 wrote: post #311
kjkjadksj wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming infrastructure costs would be the same for a 10x denser population. I’ve read articles where even on a per capita basis just about everything is more costly in dense cities, from sewers to schools. It would take some careful scrutiny to identify what is actually optimal, and I expect that to depend heavily on the local economy. For example maybe the fact that the lima peru skyline looks like lima per…

> I’ve read articles where even on a per capita basis just about everything is more costly in dense cities, from sewers to schools. Link? This NotJustBikes video suggests it is the other way around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Here is one. Njb is another one of these strong towns esque orgs that parrots the usual points to people who get their text based content through a talking head speaking it to them.

https://arpitrage.substack.com/p/contra-strong-towns

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#649

Post by kjkjadksj »

scsilver wrote: post #326
kjkjadksj wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All they have to do is restart the old passenger rail system they had in the 40s. It connected the entire front range with salt lake and all the major cities in utah including park city, went down to santa fe in the south, and hit just about all the towns and ski resorts that were around at the time. Even the ones that are a little more annoying to get to today like aspen or telluride. What is even more tempting is t…

Can you lead me to some background on this? I'd love to look at some of the routes and law behind it.

It was called the denver and rio grande railroad

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#650

Post by kjkjadksj »

kortilla wrote: post #490
kjkjadksj wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All they have to do is restart the old passenger rail system they had in the 40s. It connected the entire front range with salt lake and all the major cities in utah including park city, went down to santa fe in the south, and hit just about all the towns and ski resorts that were around at the time. Even the ones that are a little more annoying to get to today like aspen or telluride. What is even more tempting is t…

That system was slow and doesn’t solve the same problems. It’s competing with long range travel and all of those track routes were far slower than just driving. The problems that Colorado faces are transportation within urban areas. Driving to salt lake and ski resorts isn’t an issue.

All those routes could be made faster and it also had routes running down the front range too. Either way traffic on 70 into summit county is stupid and this is the salve. Already exists. Already graded. Already set up to serve vail and many other destinations that people rent a car from DEN to reach today.
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